Are Cornish Politics Celtic?
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Are Cornish politics Celtic? Bernard Deacon (A paper presented to ‘The Politics of the Celtic Fringe’ symposium, organised by the Institute of Cornish Studies, Tremough Campus, Penryn, 21st June 2013) In the first few years of the twentieth century a small band of Cornish revivalists struggled to convince sceptical Celticists in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany that Cornwall too was Celtic. If they could return now they would no doubt be surprised and delighted in equal measure to observe Cornwall’s regularly ascribed Celtic status. Participation in pan-Celtic cultural events is accompanied by a cultural pantheon of ‘Celtic’ music, ‘Celtic’ imagery and ‘Celtic’ artefacts. Cornwall is even deemed worthy of inclusion in academic works on Celtic geographies and histories.1 Although the average person on Cornwall’s streets may not be so predisposed to attach a ‘Celtic’ prefix to themselves, Cornwall’s position as one of the Celtic nations of north west Europe would seem secure. However, if Cornwall’s culture can be re-branded and packaged as Celtic, can its politics be likewise? In order to assess how Celtic they are we must first determine what is meant by Celtic politics. The concept might be approached in three ways. We could seek to describe politics in the Celtic countries. This then begs the question of what qualifies as a Celtic country. Here, I adopt the assumption of most Celtic Studies scholars is that it applies to territories where a Celtic language is spoken.2 Or we might adopt a normative view of Celtic politics, taking the existence of pan-Celtic consciousness and connections for granted and signing up to its desirability.3 From within either of these approaches Cornish politics are automatically Celtic and the question posed in this paper’s title becomes redundant. Yet there is a third way. We can also ask how far Celtic politics as a concept is a useful analytical tool for understanding politics in the Celtic territories and the character of their political systems, processes and structures. In practice approaches will combine elements of all three of these approaches. However, my intention here is to ask explicitly how far Cornwall fits into a model of Celtic politics and how far such a model then enables us to understand the actual and potential politics of Cornwall. Where do we find a model of Celtic politics? One recent attempt to pull together the political characteristics commonly associated with the Celtic countries (in particular Celtic Britain and in practice more narrowly Ireland, Scotland and Wales) has been made by Kurt Jefferson.4 Jefferson posits a wide ranging typology of Celtic politics that includes language and race, territory, political culture, social democracy, economics and religion.5 Leaning towards a descriptive and historicist approach, his model is too broad for the purposes of this brief assessment. Nonetheless, I have selected three elements in order to establish a comparative setting which allows us to evaluate the ‘Celticity’ of Cornwall’s contemporary politics. These are the presence of devolved institutions, an ethno-nationalist or ethno-regionalist identity, and a particular political culture. Devolved institutions Cornwall falls at the first hurdle as it is the only Celtic country without a devolved institution. The Cornish Constitutional Convention, founded in 2000 to demand a 1 Cornish Assembly, was effectively blown out of the water by the pre-emptive strike of Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians at Truro and Westminster, who commandeered the Cornish level of territory in 2009 for local government. While unitary local government on the old District scale or something similar might have opened up a space for a Cornish Assembly, a Cornwall Council shuts it down. The County Council is dead; long live the county! However, within the devolved institutions of the remaining Celtic countries Jefferson notes other aspects. First, Celtic representative institutions are elected by forms of proportional representation - the single transferable vote in Ireland, additional member systems in Scotland and Wales, and a list system for the Breton regional council. Second, these institutions are, he claims, more female-friendly than the norm. In 2003 the Welsh Assembly became the first democratically elected assembly in the world where 50% of members were women, although this proportion has since slipped back. Third, the party systems of the Celtic countries are multi-party and ‘moderate’, with the exception of Northern Ireland. With no devolved institution comes no PR, although we can compare the presence of female councillors on Cornwall Council with their numbers in the devolved institutions. Table 1: Women representatives (%) 2005/09 2010/13 Wales 45 40 Scotland 36 36 Cornwall Council 28 23 House of Commons 20 22 Irish Dail 14 16 Cornwall Council does not appear on this basis to be much more female-friendly than the House of Commons. Indeed, the proportion of women declined at the 2013 local elections. Yet we might also note that Irish electors return even fewer women, thus illustrating that on closer examination this model of Celtic politics is not always applicable across all the other Celtic countries either. Jefferson points out how the majority of the devolved institutions have moderate multi-party systems, involving three or more major parties who share basic assumptions about the legitimacy of democratic structures.6 His exception is Northern Ireland, which he characterises as polarized pluralism. However, with consociationalism at Stormont finally established in 2007 after a five year stand-off, and its relatively successful operation since, it would not be stretching things too far to include Northern Ireland as well within a moderate multi-party system. Jefferson’s description of Westminster as a two-party system might also be challenged. Even the straitjacket of the UK’s antiquated plurality voting system fails to prevent the growing diversity of voting patterns on the ground slowly seeping into the Commons, as the onset of coalition politics in that chamber since 2010 might indicate. Indeed, the European norm would seem to be moderate multi-partism. In this respect Cornwall Council is not atypical. At the 2013 local elections representatives from six separate 2 political parties plus assorted Independents were returned. Moreover, the biggest group (the Lib Dems) can only muster 29% of the available seats. Yet, while multi-partism is familiar at a local level, Cornish politics at the state level present a contrasting picture. At the 2010 general election the two largest parties in Cornwall won 82.7% of the vote. This was much higher than in the other Celtic countries and even in England. Table 2: Share of the vote for the two largest parties 2010 (%) share parties Cornwall 82.7 Conservative/Liberal Democrat Brittany (2012) 69.7 Parti Socialiste/Union pour un Movement Populaire England 67.2 Consevative/Labour Wales 62.4 Conservative/Labour Scotland 61.9 Labour/Scottish national Party Ireland (2011) 55.5 Fine Gael/Labour On this measure and at this level Cornwall is still locked into an older two-party system. Moreover, this is one that looks back not to the twentieth century but to the party system of the nineteenth. At the parliamentary level Cornish politics have apparently not yet managed to transcend the age of Gladstone. Ethno-national identities In the Celtic model of politics we expect to find a strand of politics that reflects the presence of a national or regional identity. It is based on ideas of devolution and self- determination, the rights of an indigenous ethnicity and the defence of cultural autonomy. Organised political nationalism emerged first in Ireland, followed in the first half of the twentieth century by Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall in that order. After a bloody struggle that combined the ballot and the bullet, the 26 counties of Ireland achieved independence within the Commonwealth in 1921 and full sovereignty by 1949. Despite short-lived attempts by a minority to win independence, by violent means, notably in Brittany and Wales in the 1970s and 80s,7 the ethno- nationalist struggle in the other Celtic countries has rejected the Irish model and focused on the democratic path to self-determination. But inevitably, some ethno- nationalist parties are further down that road than others. 3 Table 3: Mean percentage vote of ethno-nationalist parties at state level (%) MK (% seats Plaid Cymru SNP UDB contested) 2001 2.1 (60) 14.3 20.1 1.5 (94) (Brittany: 2002) 2005 1.7 (80) 13.2 18.0 2.7 (44) (Brittany: 2007) 2010 1.9 11.3 19.9 2.2 (30) (Brittany: 2012) It is usual for political scientists rather simplistically to use the vote for ethno- nationalist parties as a measure of the strength of ethno-national identity. On this measure any ethno-national identity in Cornwall is not merely weaker than the Celtic norm but pathetically so. While at the last three parliamentary elections the SNP won the support of around a fifth of Scottish voters and Plaid Cymru over a tenth of Welsh, MK has not been able to convince more than one in fifty of the electorate to vote for it in parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, this proportion is not much inferior to that won by the Union Démocratique Bretonne (UDB) in Brittany, the oldest and most active party of the Breton Emsav. If we exclude the exceptional case of the UDB’s Paul Molac in Ploermel, who in 2012 was given a free run by the Parti Socialiste and Les Verts and scored 26% in the first round, the UDB’s vote when opposing the main French political traditions is similar to MK’s, especially given the smaller proportion of seats it contests. However, it has been widely observed that ethno-nationalist parties perform much better in regional elections than at state level.8 This is indeed the case in Wales, Scotland and Brittany, as Table 4 indicates.